Capture selected text from active window

Question

Hi all Need on your help on this. I need to capture the selected text from the current window (be it a browser or any other application) and print it in my c# console application (for now - to keep is simple). I got some help from the following thread: http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/Forums/ShowMessages.aspx?ThreadID=46461 But it gives me an ArgumentOutOfRange exception in the last line (substring operation) Other ideas / approaches for implementing this are also welcome. Thanks in advance Jd

Vic Rodniansky · Answer

Hi. This code gets and sets the text from url bar of IE for example.. I must get the highlited text from other parts of a browser as well or any other application. Could you please help me with this issue? Thanks a lot. Vic.

Roei Bar · Answer

here is the code you asked for: sing System ; using System . Text ; using System . Runtime . InteropServices ; public class Example { [ DllImport ( user32.dll )] static extern int GetFocus (); [ DllImport ( user32.dll )] static extern bool AttachThreadInput ( uint idAttach  uint idAttachTo  bool fAttach ); [ DllImport ( kernel32.dll )] static extern uint GetCurrentThreadId (); [ DllImport ( user32.dll )] static extern uint GetWindowThreadProcessId ( int hWnd  int ProcessId ); [ DllImport ( user32.dll ) ] static extern int GetForegroundWindow (); [ DllImport ( user32.dll  CharSet = CharSet . Auto  SetLastError = false )] static extern int SendMessage ( int hWnd  int Msg  int wParam  StringBuilder lParam ); const int WM_SETTEXT = 12 ; const int WM_GETTEXT = 13 ; public static void Main () { //Wait 5 seconds to give us a chance to give focus to some edit window //notepad for example System . Threading . Thread . Sleep ( 5000 ); StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder ( 500 ); int foregroundWindowHandle = GetForegroundWindow (); uint remoteThreadId = GetWindowThreadProcessId ( foregroundWindowHandle  0 ); uint currentThreadId = GetCurrentThreadId (); //AttachTrheadInput is needed so we can get the handle of a focused window in another app AttachThreadInput ( remoteThreadId  currentThreadId  true ); //Get the handle of a focused window int focused = GetFocus (); //Now detach since we got the focused handle AttachThreadInput ( remoteThreadId  currentThreadId  false ); //Get the text from the active window into the stringbuilder SendMessage ( focused  WM_GETTEXT  builder . Capacity  builder ); Console . WriteLine ( Text in active window was  + builder ); builder . Append (  Extra text ); //Change the text in the active window SendMessage ( focused  WM_SETTEXT  0  builder ); Console . ReadKey (); } }